Ms Emma O'Friel:

I want to say that there are also children who know from the very beginning, Alana Newman being one and it still does not change it. While it is better not to withhold the truth, there are plenty of donor conceived people who have known from the beginning and their parents were completely open but they reached the stage that we all reach of wanting to know who they are and of feeling different.

I hear a common thread in talking to adoptees and donor conceived people who say they feel different or displaced. My neighbour calls herself a late discovery adoptee from the illegal system within Ireland and she found out she was adopted at the age of 50. She never knew her mother and, through DNA, was able to find her biological mother. She says that it makes everything make sense. Here is a woman who she laughs like, with whom she has many similarities and a connection that she never had with the family in which she grew up. That is not to say there are not very good experiences and loving people involved, but the starting question has to be when is it right to separate a child from their genetic family. That is the starting point, not farther down the line, and we need to ask how can we make this better. We have to ask when is it right and we know, in all our other practices, it is never right unless it is for their protection. This is not for their protection. It is not even a medical procedure. It is using a medical tool, in IVF, which is a fabulous medical tool that means fertilisation can occur outside the body, but it is taking that tool, which is being used for AHR and affecting the concept of distance, in that a man and a woman anywhere in the world can be used to fertilise a client. The important part is that the distance makes it all seem clinical and sanitised and we do not see it down the road. These clinics are finding the greatest sources of fertile young people and that is students, namely, 19, 20 and 21 year olds, who are our children. The clinics can go to Trinity and UCD and tell their clients to sit down and wait while they find somebody who will breed. They recruit a mass of young students. These students are young and money is an issue. This comes back to the point about compensation. There can be regulation for compensation but it remains an incentive, it is still money. Men get €200 in Denmark and that is a lot of money to a student, even if it is just drinking money.

Similarly, women get paid roughly €1,000 in England. That is a huge incentive for somebody in the Czech Republic or Ukraine. Once money is a factor, it becomes business. Clinics are doing wonderful things with IVF and technology and are helping but, when helping somebody else is tightly connected with financial gain, then it is a business.